Continuum (2012-15) ended its fourth and final season on SyFy here in the US and Showcase in Canada last month (we can still watch it — eventually all of it — on Netflix, though). Typical of most science-fiction series, Continuum ended with a six-episode arc that cannibalized its main theme, in this case, time-travel. Six episodes about soldiers from the future attempting to prevent the creation of a better-future-alternate-timeline for the year 2077, one that didn’t include corporate plutocratic totalitarianism over the rest of the world. Continuum’s creator Simon Barry could have and should have done better. This ending obscured what Barry attempted to illuminate throughout the series. Despite the problems of a bludgeoned timeline and plot in Season Four, Barry did get the idea of a potential corporate dystopia correct. His Continuum offered up the idea that the twenty-first century world is already at war, between more economic and political freedom on the one hand, and increasing global economic inequality and corporate influence on the other.

Continuum was the Canadian sci-fi show about Kiera Cameron (played by Rachel Nichols), a police officer from 2077 but stuck in the 2010s with a group of time-traveling anti-capitalist terrorists known as Liber8. Continuum, though, is hardly the only show with the theme of a dark near future. FOX’s Fringe (2008-13) and the short-lived yet cult favorite SyFy series Firefly (2002) were both examples of a world in which corporate interests and government power had nearly become one and the same. Yet in those series, whether located on an alternative Earth or the twenty-sixth century, there remained a line between corporate influence and governmental authority.

Humans as mindless drones (implanted with mind-controlling chips) working off debt at a factory in British Columbia, Continuum, Season 2, Episode 9, July 7, 2013. (http://www.syfy.com).

On this point alone, Continuum succeeded precisely because it didn’t pretend there were better days of capitalism and democracy in the past. From its pilot episode, set in present/alternate future Vancouver, British Columbia, Barry’s vision of a plausible darker future shined through. It was a future in which corporations would eliminate the nation-state entirely as the middleman for its profitability and power interests. The Global Corporate Congress would be the resulting outcome of the failures of governments around the globe to address population growth, climate change, trillions of dollars of debt and a host of other issues. But really, it would also be the outcome of corporations using governments and government tax breaks to corrupt democracy and hoard wealth. Barry realized that this alternative course is one the world is already on.

The biggest question any serious fan of Continuum should have is this. Why didn’t Barry send the terrorist group Liber8 back to 1977, where the path toward the Global Corporate Congress could’ve been destroyed before billionaire social-control advocates like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and Charles Koch would have been able to build their paternalistic view of the world? After all, it’s really not that much of a leap from Gates’ heavy-handed philanthropic work in public education and the Citizens United decision in the US to a world plutocratic government run by the heads of multi-trillion-dollar corporations.

The saddest aspect about the end of Continuum was the idea that it ultimately took a 83-year-old robber baron with a conscious in Alec Sadler (played by William B. Davis and Erik Knudsen) to change this dark trajectory. That billions of humans didn’t revolt to a future in which corporations controlled every aspect of their lives — that’s just appalling. Yes, Liber8 and other anti-capitalist and anti-Corporate Congress rebels (or terrorists) were around and engaged. But most people apparently allowed themselves to be led like sheep to the slaughterhouse, all for reasons involving food and security. Still, were it not for Sadler and his great time-travel device, this would be a world in which all of us would be plutocratic corporate slaves. Hard to imagine anyone like Sadler willing to change this future, precisely because this is the future real-life plutocrats like Gates, Bloomberg, Koch (and Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Phil Knight) want.

That a corporation could arbitrarily decide how families could discharge their debts, make works of art of acts of free speech contraband, and insert microchips in humans in order to keep them from rebelling or to force them to work off their debts. As disgusting as that was to see on Continuum, the sad truth is that we’re not very far from this future at all. If anything, we needed more examples of this soul-destroying future, not more muddled attempts to destroy it.

This is the real legacy of Continuum. Not its fancy time-travel motif or cool-looking gadgets. The reminder that freedoms from economic and political oppression are ideals humanity must fight for in every era. That people shouldn’t cede power to corporations over the food supply, water, law enforcement or education out of fear or desperation. That societies shouldn’t blindly trust billionaire robber barons—no matter how well-intentioned—simply because they promise some of their billions to help the poor. We the people need to trust and verify, through governments, through muckraking, protests, and, if necessary, through revolution, against this plausible future.

The fight that changed my approach to Humanities and put me back in a determined frame academically happened on this date thirty years ago. After all of these years, I find it awfully strange to look back and find that some of my more poignant moments growing up were ones of rage, resistance and renewal. All either around abuse, muggings or fights with classmates.

Strange because I’d never seen my immature and thin-skinned self as much of a fighter before that day in February ’82 (see my post earlier this week, “Quitting Before a Fight“). Strange because it often takes something only indirectly related to my struggles to cause me to regroup and fight for what I want. Strange in the ways that all immature preteen boys and girls who get into fights always are.

It had gotten so bad that month that folks who wouldn’t have dared to mess with me at the beginning of the year — guys significantly shorter than me and guys who were so superior to me that they didn’t even notice me — started messing with and threatening me. JD (see my “The Contrarian One” post from February ’11) was one of those classmates. The week before the mid-February winter break, our homeroom/English teacher Mrs. Sesay was home with the flu. Our substitute’s idea of managing a classroom was reading a newspaper while the class engaged in verbal and physical combat. It seemed that no one was safe from strife that week, including me.

JD decided that it was his turn to give me a hard time. A ten-second scuffle took place on Tuesday over the usual tweener issues of communism versus capitalism, or to use more sophisticated language, neo-Marxism versus Keynesian economics. He also didn’t like that I had corrected him the month before about Australia’s official language, which he said was “Australian.” I learned that day that you should never correct a preteen contrarian when they think that they’re right.

When I walked into the boys’ locker room for gym class that Thursday afternoon thirty years ago, I was greeted with two punches to my chin and face. He walked away and went through the green double doors to his locker, arrogant enough to think I wouldn’t respond. He muttered “stupid” as he walked away. I think it was the combination of being caught by surprise and being called “stupid” by JD that got the better of me. Or maybe it was five months of enduring public humiliation combined with the sense that things at 616 were spinning out of control.

Whatever it was, I finally snapped. I stared blankly at the red lockers, green doors, and depleted beige-colored walls for a couple of seconds, and then my mind exploded in violent colors. I threw my entire being into JD as he had started to undress at his locker, knocking him to the floor.

I choked and punched him until I had bloodied his mouth and made his nose turn red. JD attempted to fight back to no avail, as I kept my weight on his legs while I head-locked him with my left arm and wailed away with my right hand. Just as I began to run out of energy, the gym teacher came in to break us up. He yelled at us and asked “Do you want to be suspended?” When I got off the floor to go my locker, I almost couldn’t believe that I had won that fight. I went into the break with an emotional boost, one that I hoped would lead to better things for me at school.

You could say that only a nerdy preteen boy like myself would find academic motivation in a fight. That’s definitely true. But, not just someone like me. Every kid who’s trying to find their way can only work with what he or she knows or what he or she is presented with. I could’ve either decided to keep being a punching bag — literally, figuratively and academically — or decided that whatever else I wanted to be, I needed to stand up for myself and fight.

So yes, winning that fight with JD sent me into that winter break as if I’d thrown a Hail Mary to Hakeem Nicks just before halftime for a touchdown. It provided the inspiration I needed that I wasn’t getting from Humanities, A.B. Davis Middle School or 616. Where else would I have found it in February ’82?

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